#eva kollisch

[coochiequeens]

A lesbian activist, an anti-war protester and a memoirist Eva Kollisch was a woman rose above tragedy.

By Luke Peteley | lpeteley@siadvance.com

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Eva Kollisch, 98, a Jewish refugee who was educated as a teen on Staten Island and later became a noted memoirist and a lesbian rights advocate, died Oct. 10 of a chest infection at her home in Manhattan, according to media reports.

Born in 1926 to a Jewish family outside Vienna, Austria, Kollisch faced persecution from the rising Nazi regime. As war loomed in 1939, Kollisch fled the Holocaust aboard a Kindertransport train, as part of the mass rescue of nearly 10,000 children to Britain prior to the outbreak of the second world war, as detailed by Kveller.

In 1940, she and her brothers arrived in the U.S. and were reunited with their parents in New York; the family would settle in an apartment on Staten Island, according to The New York Times.

A graduate of Curtis High School, Kollisch recounted in a 2016 interview how her early political views were shaped during her time as a student at the school.

“I went to high school on Staten Island and had a couple of years, sort of uninteresting years, in high school,” she said. “But it was safe. Nobody beat me up, nobody called me a Jew b***d or anything like that. And then toward the end of my second year I met a bunch of Trotskyists and it made a big impression on me.”

She continued that she “found a kind of home, an intellectual home. And a home for my own sense of injustice and wanting to make things right, making them OK. They were far from OK.”

After high school, she left Staten Island and worked on an assembly line in Detroit, and as a labor organizer. Despite joining the Trotskyist movement as a teen, Kollisch said she became disillusioned by the overwhelming male leadership.

It wasn’t until 1986 that she met future wife Naomi Replansky, a poet and labor activist. As noted by The New York Times, she first had two marriages to men, Stanley Plastrik in 1942, and Gert Berliner, an abstract expressionist artist and fellow refugee.

While with Berliner, the couple moved to New Mexico, where Kollisch wrote while working as a cook at a uranium mine, and as a social worker. It was there that she gave birth to a son, Uri; he and a grandson are the only immediate survivors. The couple then returned to New York and separated in 1959.

“I didn’t go through this period of great suffering that so many women did in the ‘40s and ‘50s, and by the 1960s, you know, it was a part of my androgyny, really, to have loved some men and to love women,” Kollisch said in a 2004 interview.

Kollisch and Replansky married in 2009.

In 2016, after decades as a couple, Kollisch and Replansky won the Clara Lemlich Social Activist Award; in 2020, the New York Times profiled how the couple were surviving the COVID-19 pandemic together. Replansky died at age 104 in January.

For work, Kollisch was a professor of comparative literature at Sarah Lawrence College, according to Kveller.

In addition to a career as a professor, Kollisch also became a poet and a vocal activist. The Museum of Jewish Heritage notes that “her American arrest came for anti-Vietnam protests; she stood vigil as a Woman in Black, and took part in the Seneca Women’s Encampment.”

Kollisch went on to write two memoirs, “Girl in Movement” (2000) and “The Ground Under My Feet” (2007).

[antonio-velardo]

Antonio Velardo shares: Eva Kollisch, Lesbian Rights Advocate and Memoirist, Dies at 94 by Sam Roberts

By Sam Roberts A former refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, she became an openly lesbian voice in the women’s movement and a key leader in feminist studies. Published: October 20, 2023 at 05:09PM from NYT U.S. https://ift.tt/fyjAhaZ via IFTTT

[songsforgorgons]

Top: Activist and pioneering women’s studies professor Eva Kollisch (b. 1925) and her life partner of nearly thirty years, poet Naomi Replansky (b. 1918), at the Sixth Annual Clara Lemlich Awards (2016).

Middle: Eva Kollisch in 1940 (left, reprinted from A Woman Like That, Larkin, 1999) and Naomi Replansky in 1941 (right).

Bottom: Kollisch and Replansky in their home (Bengiveno, 2015) and at the Poetry Society of America Awards (2013).

"I met Naomi at a reading of Grace Paley ... I noticed this very, to my mind, beautiful and interesting-looking woman who was sitting there reading a book ... We talked and very quickly she realized my accent and she could see that I was a German Jew, I mean, Austrian Jewish refugee, and she told me that she had done a lot of work translating poetry from the German and from the French. I told her I was teaching German and she said, 'Oh, perhaps you know somebody who could help me. I need to brush up on my German. Do you have an assistant or a student who would work with me?' She asked this very sincerely. And I said, 'Maybe I can work with you' ... We did give each other certain literary — we had a little literary exchange of reading poetry together, talking German and French literature, and I had a country house at that time, a shared country house, and I invited her up. I could see this is a woman who was really deeply wonderful and beautiful and I was nervous that she might be with somebody but it turned out she was not ..." 

 — Eva Kollisch, interviewed by Kate Weigand for the Smith College Voices of Feminism Oral History Project (2004).

“I grew up during the Depression. I was in the Young Communist League in the mid to late 1930s ... To think that if Eva and I had met each other back then we would have considered each other mortal enemies! Yet we had the same motivation, to make the world a better and more just place.” 

 — Naomi Replansky, interviewed by Edith Chevat (Bridges, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2002).

[foreheadtouch]

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/nyregion/naomi-replansky-eva-kollisch-coronavirus.html?smid=ig-nytimes&utm_source=like2buy.curalate.com&crl8_id=b49e6b96-cbcd-4084-9234-1c381bdd5657

allow me to........ cry

[ancestorsalive]

Just ask Eva Kollisch, left, and Naomi Replansky about survival and resilience. Credit... Mary-Elizabeth Gifford.

[sweetlyresonating]

Naomi said being Jewish is very important to her. Why? “Hitler made me a Jew,” Naomi explained.

https://www.kveller.com/jewish-couple-naomi-replansky-101-and-eva-kollisch-95-share-their-inspiring-stories-of-resilience/

This is how I feel about the rise in anti-Semitism in the US.

THIS is what made me a Jew. THIS. People who hate Jews made me into a Jew.

[fugglecases]

bro I need like 8 books on their lives stat??? please excuse me while i do 8 hours of reading and research

anyways this article is about Naomi Replansky and Eva Kollisch. Naomi is from the bronx and is a poet and activist and she was friends with Richard Wright (one of the most influential Black american writers) and Bertolt Brecht (probably best known on here for the “In the dark times, Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” quote).

Eva escaped Nazi-led Austria and eventually made it to Staten Island. She was part of a Trotskyite group as a labor organizer, she hitchhiked the country, and then taught at sarah lawrence, AND she “was a lover of Susan Sontag’s” like BROOOOO. she’s been described as a “feminist lesbian peace activist; anti-Stalin Marxist Trotskyite” like... what a resume!

Anyways they were introduced by Grace Paley (another iconic Jewish writer and activist) in 1986 and have lived together ever since

[mykristeva]

Naomi Replansky and Eva Kollisch both began their literary activism in a factory. Born in the Bronx in 1918, Replansky toiled in factories, starting on an assembly line during World War II in the heyday of Rosie the Riveter, and eventually graduated to operating a lathe. Years later, she trained herself to become a pioneering computer programmer for not-for-profit organizations, starting with the earliest punch cards used by the first giant computers. This variegated background helped Replansky develop into an eloquent poet of the working class. She published her first poems in 1936, and the first collection of her work, Ring Song, was published by Scribner in 1952.

For some decades, Replansky and Kollisch have shared their lives on the Upper West Side. Eva Kollisch, an American Jewish author and a professor emerita at Sarah Lawrence College, was born in Vienna in 1925. She was rescued from the Nazis on a 1939 Kindertransport to the United Kingdom, eventually arriving in America in 1940. Like Replansky, Kollisch started out working in factories during World War II, though she eventually became a specialist in German and comparative literature.

Kollisch published the memoir Girl in Movement in 2000, about her life as a young Viennese Jewish refugee in Staten Island. One review praises “…the marvel of her youthful, and continuing, commitment to social justice, and her search for more complex visions of freedom. Eva Kollisch could have been swept away by history: instead she turned to grapple with it.” In 2008 she published The Ground Under My Feet, a meditation on being a Holocaust survivor. Grace Paley described the book as “…beautifully written. It has more history in it than most historians give us.”

An activist for over half six decades, in anti-war, feminist and human rights causes, most recently Kollisch is a member of One by One, a small intergenerational group that practices dialogue with the enemy.

(via http://www.laborarts.org/)

[ravencromwell]

As a poet, Naomi preferred the order of formalism. In the “Ring Song,’’ she uses light verse to convey the abruptly shifting rhythms of deprivation and contentment, the sense that happiness is ultimately a human reflex as much as it is an aspiration:

Nude in the marketplace I stand. When I stand and am not sold I build a fire against the cold. When the cold does not destroy I leap from ambush on my joy.

Have found myself a new favorite poet: the magnificent Mrs. Replansky. The Entire Ny Times article about Naomi and her wife, Eva Kollisch is well worth a read. (If the article proves inaccessible through their periodic paywall, Replansky and Kollisch are well worth looking up in other sources. Both are magnificently radical queer ladies who I just discovered today. Eva once worked in an auto factory where her job, seeing as she was fleet and nimble, was to leap atop the hoods to put windshields in place. And at night she led a Trotskyite labor group. And you need look no further than Replansky's poetry to see her radicalism.)

[buuqye-ziiqpu]

"They Survived the Spanish Flu, the Depression and the Holocaust" by Ginia Bellafante via NYT New York https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/nyregion/naomi-replansky-eva-kollisch-coronavirus.html?partner=IFTTT

[louqno-beaqfo]

"They Survived the Spanish Flu, the Depression and the Holocaust" by Ginia Bellafante via NYT New York https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/nyregion/naomi-replansky-eva-kollisch-coronavirus.html?partner=IFTTT

[zaatca-qiuzho]

"They Survived the Spanish Flu, the Depression and the Holocaust" by Ginia Bellafante via NYT New York https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/nyregion/naomi-replansky-eva-kollisch-coronavirus.html?partner=IFTTT

[letsmuiwjezaevbe]

"They Survived the Spanish Flu, the Depression and the Holocaust" by Ginia Bellafante via NYT New York https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/nyregion/naomi-replansky-eva-kollisch-coronavirus.html?partner=IFTTT

[leihxo-xaumro]

"They Survived the Spanish Flu, the Depression and the Holocaust" by Ginia Bellafante via NYT New York https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/28/nyregion/naomi-replansky-eva-kollisch-coronavirus.html?partner=IFTTT